Catastrophic thinking is a debilitating source of anxiety that plagues a lot of us. Most simply, it means jumping to the worst-case scenario when thinking about a situation or future event.
Your husband doesn’t call you on his way home from work like he usually does, and you decide he must have been in an accident and is probably dead.
The term “Narcissistic Personality” is currently popping up a lot in the news, so I thought it would be a good subject for an article. Any time a mental health diagnosis begins to surface regularly in popular culture, distortions and misunderstandings occur about what it means.
Let’s start with a definition of “personality disorder.”
Gossip is a part of life. Most everyone has engaged in it. It starts early in life, usually in elementary school, but it gets a big boost in middle and high school. You’d hope that it would be left there as people grow up and move into adult life, but that’s not the case.
Go in any office setting and you will hear it, or just sit in a restaurant with you ears open. Better yet, go on Facebook and you’ll see every kind of people bashing imaginable.
When you’re focused on outcomes and end results, and you measure your sense of worth and value in terms of your achievements and performance, you can easily see yourself as a failure when you don’t succeed.
Worse yet, you become the failure. That leaves you swinging between feeling really worthy when you achieve, and really unworthy when you don’t.
Recently a client said to me that he wanted to do something “great” with his life. He’s a young man at the beginning of his career, and he has aspirations to succeed.
There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a normal desire, but as we continued talking about it, I knew there was more going on. There was a strong sense of urgency, and even a little tinge of desperation.
With the amount of talking we all do, it would be a good idea to step back and assess how well you think people listen when you are talking.
Do you feel heard? Do you think that others value what you have to say? Do you have a voice?
There is simply too much to do, yes?
I’m guessing almost everyone can relate to that statement. So what have you tried to make it all work?
Have you tried planners, new organization programs, goal-setting, resolutions, even apps that are supposed to help? And then you got excited about the new program and started off with a an enthusiastic bang, only to lose your resolve when things started to pile up? Yeah, me too.
It’s a weekday, about 8 or 9 in the evening. You’ve had a long day at work, or a long day with the kids, or both.
You’ve managed to get through the dinner hour. Everyone’s fed, dishes are done, kids are bathed and off to bed, and you’re finally able to relax.
You have this small space of time in the evening that’s yours, and you are soooo looking forward to it!
Have you noticed that anxiety seems to be more acute late at night?
It is. This is particularly true if you’re dealing with a problem that you haven’t found a way to resolve.
The truth is, anxiety is almost always worse late at night or in the early morning. Whatever bothers you during the day takes on a whole new life after you climb into bed, and then some.
Okay, so tell me if you’ve been here before . . .
I started my Monday morning off silently complaining to myself about all the stuff I had to do in the week ahead. Not enough time, too many intrusions, how will I ever get my blog writing done, work on my book, see clients I have scheduled, take care of my dogs, do house stuff, and on and on and on . . .
As I’m chugging coffee and letting my imagination build a giant case for a bad week, I realized what I was doing.